I’m a bit sick of the marriage equality/same sex marriage/marry a donkey or a cat/won’t somebody think of the Christians/children/God’s apparently delicate feelings ‘debate’. One of the reasons I’m sick of it is because it’s never really been anything worthy of the name ‘debate’. Depressingly successful attempts to reduce the issue to a semantic dispute, inflate it into some sort of moral existential crisis, or otherwise obfuscate a very clear-cut issue with rank silliness, have left me deeply unwilling to participate in any way. Except for one, of course. If our Captains Courageous are successful in their bid to abrogate their moral and legal leadership and shift it back on to us, I will emphatically vote in favour of marriage equality, even if I have to use the experimental archaeology skills involved in doing this by ‘post’. Whatever that is.

Sure, there’s a few problems with this. There’s the problem of religious protections, for example. Now, religious protections are crucially important for a free society. They’re the same protections which allow me to suggest that fundamentalist Christians should be de-registered as humans because nothing with a cognitive ability that low should be given either a vote or a seat in parliament. I’m looking at you, Magic Mike Baird and the right faction of the Liberal Party. And I suppose it’s important that the poor beleaguered minority of Christian cake makers, eking out an existence in the majority religion of the nation, shouldn’t be bullied by horrible militant gays or suchlike. Actually, it probably isn’t. But the preservation of real and actual religious pluralism is definitely top priority if I’m not to lose my right to say that belief in an anthropomorphic interventionist god should be classified by the UN as a disability. Leaving aside the fact that it’s got four fifths of diddly squat to do with marriage equality, in the abstract, it’s an important principle.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of this whole postal plebiscite/survey/waste of time/display of moral cowardice/popular vote thing. If I were to display the same kind of moral rigour as a Cato the Elder, or either of the Brutii, I’d probably be required to treat this whole debacle with Olympian detachment and abstain. The grounds for this would be that voting to change back a piece of legislation which was more or less arbitrarily changed by a befuddled reactionary thirteen years ago simply isn’t my job. It’s parliament’s. And that actual equality before the law for all citizens, regardless of orientation or creed, is not a question of popular will, but of moral and legal necessity. And that this is not so much a bid to gauge the (entirely irrelevant in this case) popular will, but rather a pathetically transparent delaying tactic designed to appease the government’s conservative Catholic base. Leaving all that aside, my personal belief is that it’s incumbent on us to rise above the nonsense and gently but firmly show the government the bloody obvious, rather like a new dog owner pushing a puppy’s snout into the mess it’s just made on the carpet.

So, regardless of what happens in various courts, or in the morally mendacious lower house and its mentally deficient cousin, the upper, I’d say the order of priority would run as follows:

Vote ‘yes’ on marriage equality

Demand parliamentarians do their actual jobs

Marry a cat

That last one’s basically designed to keep Corey Bernardi happy. Because when he’s not happy, he talks about stuff, which is almost as bad as having a government who actually has to ask the general public whether or not it should continue to actively deprive sections of the population of their basic statutory and human rights.